Easyling on the road: conferences in March

April 16, 2016 - Andrea Barta

Throughout March, we were busy travelling and meeting with our clients and partners.

Warsaw, Poland

On March 11-12, Peter Farago, our CEO visited Warsaw, Poland for The Translation and Localization Conference. Among the many thought-provoking presentations, Madhuri Hedge from Mayflower Language Services discussed the possibilities and obstacles of translating e-commerce sites for the Indian market. There are 22 different languages in India, and only 5% of the population is fully fluent in English, so translation is a must for local and global e-commerce site owners. But how? Can smaller companies with limited resources enter the field? (Recently we covered similar issues in our blog post More words than dollars.)

Do you speak Klingon or Dothraki? The keynote speaker, David Peterson told us about the birth of several constructed languages he has created for TV-series (HBO’s Game of Thrones, Syfy’s Defiance) and movies (Thor). David shared the rewards and frustrations of this unique field.

New York, NY

From March 20 to 23, we attended and exhibited at the annual GALA conference in New York. Besides inspiring lectures, we had plenty of opportunities to meet and talk with good friends again.

An exciting new direction of machine translation was presented by Kyunghyun Cho, a researcher at the New York University (NYU). Neural machine translation is a departure from statistical translation, adding a learning component based on the neural networks of the brain. Unlike pure statistical translation, neural translation components are interconnected and trained to maximize performance.